The PICA Awards: The best of the best

Top winners this year were Sarie, winning the Rossi Trophy for best consumer magazine, Wooworths' TASTE magazine winning the Customer Magazine of the Year, and Andy Mark, editor of RISKSA, Watling Trophy for Editor of the Year: Business-to-Business Publishing.

Sumien Brink, editor of the Woolworths' TASTE magazine was very happy with their achievement. "It is always fantastic to win, and it is a category we won for three years in a row and then last year we did not. As a result we had a good hard look at ourselves. We worked very hard and upped our benchmark on the visual side and on the content, and it has paid off."

She says food is the new sex. "It is very fashionable to write about food - on print and digital platforms - and this has increased the competition in this sector hugely. But competition is good as it keeps us on our toes."

Their challenge going forward will be to offer a better integrated brand. "We are working to ensure the website and print product are closely entwined.

Sarie, but we did win

Sarie editor, Michelle van Breda, said she never expect to win. "We always put out quality work - it is what Sarie stands for, but we are a smaller editorial team with more brand extensions as well as digital platforms and an ecommerce site."

For her the key to Sarie's success is its relevance to its readers. "This is what we work very hard at. There are many magazines in South Africa that do the same as Sarie so it is imperative that we know what our reader wants all the time. I would say that in today's world our biggest challenge is to know our audience. Therefore we stay close to our readers through reader events and festivals - we use whatever avenues we can."

Being a local magazine has its positive and negative as well. "International publications can feed off commonplace insights happening globally. That's a bit harder for us to do. But we can connect directly with our reader in her language."

While we are living in a digital world and are all connected, she also sees a certain isolation happening. "If you have 5,000 friends on Facebook, what does that mean? Our readers want more direct social contact."

General-interest magazines have a huge challenge ahead as they do a bit of everything. "At Sarie we will continue to work hard and do our best. We love this brand and its audience."

She was also very pleased with the Bronze Bookmark, a digital award, at the Digital Media and Marketing Association (DMMA) Bookmark Awards, which Sarie was awarded on the same evening!

RISKSA revamped

In the Business-to-Business category, RISKSA was awarded the Watling Trophy for, for Business-to-Business Magazine of the Year for the third year in a row. Andy Mark, editor of RISKSA, says that the key to their success again this year lies with their complete revamp of the title. "It was during the FIPP conference in London earlier this year that I had another opportunity to benchmark RISKSA against leading B2B titles from around the world. We ran a survey amongst our readers on my return and using this feedback, together with what I had learned in London, decided to completely change the magazine size, fonts and masthead, all with a view to making the magazine easier to read and improve legibility" he says

Mark explains that they also changed their approach to their covers. "We have a captive business market and so don't really compete on the news stand but decided nonetheless to give our covers a much more consumer-like appeal."

Mark says the real RISKSA advantage lies in its content. "Content trumps everything on our floor. I am thrilled that my editorial team were recognised for their contribution. For the PICA judges to recognise the quality of our features and profiles means the world to my relatively young team."